In part one, Shimon Sandler and I spoke outside of my house in the cold weather about growing your search marketing agency. We continued that talk outside about how he went out and jumped from being in-house to starting his own search marketing agency. We also spoke about strategies to keep your clients spending money.
How To Build Your Search Marketing Agency:
Shimon said making the transition from working for someone else to working for yourself was tough. He said he spent some time watching motivational videos and it helped him make that jump. To make that jump, you need to be motivation and have faith. He often feels that winning and losing deals don’t often have much logic to it, it is often up to a higher purpose.
Owning your own business has a different level of stress than working for someone else. He also said it is different appreciation. The appreciation he receives from his clients is above and beyond what he received working as an employee. I can relate, often if you hire an agency to do work for you, the agency cares more than your own employees.
It is also important to have processes and be consistent throughout your day. You need to allocate time every day to do sales and reach out to those relationships and do cold calling through LinkedIn or social media is something you need to do on a consistent basis. I then talked about a movie about handling leads and sales, the movie is named The Pursuit of Happyness.
In any event, he said most of the clients he tries to obtain are the ones everyone is aware of. The ones you see on TV, the ones you have in your every day life.
A key takeaway he wanted to make was that getting one client, a small agency that he reached out to, helped his business get a whole slew of clients. You can do white label work that way.
How To Keep Clients Spending Money:
The goal for every firm is to get your existing clients who signed a deal with you to renew that deal and to spend money with you for as long as possible. Some agencies get stuck is that they do an SEO audit and they get the list done and there is nothing left to do. What he tries to do is embed their team into the company they are working with. Shimon’s company does content optimization, which means they review and edit content before the client publishes that content - that is ongoing work, ongoing forever. That process is embedded in the workflow of the company and there is never a shortage of that content.
Site speed can be a huge project alone he said, it is not as simple as sending off recommendations to the client. SERP optimization is another repeatable type of service they offer their clients, it is about making sure the company’s brand appears favorable in the search results. This includes the search results, the knowledge panels, the videos and images in the search results for their brand name. The job is to make that SERP experience as pretty and robust as possible, Shimon said. Some of this has to do with Wikipedia and Wikidata and other sites.
Before we froze to death, we decided to end with one tip from Shimon. He said in the publisher world, he loves to do editorial training sessions. Offering the companies you work with educational offerings and training the teams on how to do SEO with their content. He highly recommends you provide an editorial training session package for clients. You can do these sessions as a one-off, do it quarterly or as often as needed. It is another service you can add to your package of services.
If you are looking to hire Shimon and his company, connect with Shimon Sandler on LinkedIn.
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
